Navaleye,

thank you for your analysis of the conflict from which I have just returned. I think you also said to another poster:

I hope you don't mind if I quote this back to you, as well as I would like to remind you of some pertinent ones (facts that is). You said:

Not needed AAR? Then why were we giving so much fuel to the Rafales and Super Etendards off the Charles de Gaulle? On costs, I hope you're not relying on the crayon calculations of Mr Ward - that's been done to death on another thread. Your stats on the RAF contributing less than 10% of the sorties? Depending on how you measure it you could come to that conclusion, although I hope you don't imagine that is any form of measure of effectiveness - if you do, you'll need to swallow the fact that the RAF contributed significantly more than the jets on the CDG, who actually didn't bring anything more than the FAF jets out of Solenzara...

You are Lewis Page and I claim my £5. Precisely what are you intending to hit with your TLAMs, as I don't see any of the ISTAR assets we needed to do target development, and of course giving up big bombs and Storm Shadow would mean we couldn't have hit any of the hardened targets. Clearly within your "no other assets" you have some means of carrying out SEAD, JPR, COMINT, SIGINT, IMINT, battlespace management [no, Tourist, Baggers aren't equipped to dynamically manage a 100-line ATO from an altitude high enough to see as far as an E-3 can...] etc? Oh, and also, knowing the rate at which we can fire TLAMs and a generous allowance for sortie generation from CVS with Harrier, it would take you in the order of a week to carry out a typical day's strike serials for the period May to July.

Now, don't get me wrong - I do think carriers are useful, but I can categorically say that in this conflict they have not been essential - and actually, as long as we'd had the jets, I don't think we'd really have missed them on many occasions.

The point to be made here is at the start of the thread - someone in MoD has been briefing journalists something wildly inaccurate just to keep the carrier question in the news.

I thank Jimlad for his balanced view - I, too, am immensely impressed by what BROCKLESBY and the TLAM shooters achieved. I have some inside info on Liverpool so so less impressed there, but that should not detract. Frankly I have found the RN to be a really professional lot wherever I have found them, but all this carping and spinning that a carrier can do the job of the RAF is not helping anyone in Defence - including the RN, who are in my opinion being sold down the river to protect a totemic capability while their surface fleet (which really delivers, and is what they should be concentrating on) creaks with overtasking.

Jimlad, I was involved in delivering the show-and-tell the other week, so thanks for the feedback!

My point was simply this. If our witless government had kept our Harrier capability we could have put 16 Harriers in theatre at a fraction of the cost of what we have paid. The French and Italians both deployed naval aviation because it was ideally suited to the job. Launching Storm Shadow strikes from Marham was sheer madness. We and the USN had more than enough TLAM capability nearby to do the job.

Sorry, but it's clear you either don't know enough about the situation or haven't read the previous posts, and those on other forums.

The French and Italians deployed carrier aviation, but as a small part of their overall effort and it was not by any means critical to the effort. It wasn't "ideally suited to the job", or there would have been some observable difference between what we got out of carrier-borne air and land-based air. Actually, there wasn't.

If you think that TLAM could have done the job of Storm Shadow, clearly you don't know enough about the weapons. The USN fired something like 102 TLAM on the first night, but the USAF still needed to drop several times that many bombs, and Storm Shadow was required as well - TLAM has a comparatively small warhead (just under a 500lb yield) and no penetrative capability. It has basically no capability against bunkers and other hardened targets.

I would very much like to have kept the Harrier in the RAF inventory, but even if we had been able to afford it it would not have replaced the capability provided by Tornado and Typhoon. Don't forget that Italy deployed AV8s on Garibaldi - and frankly, they didn't bring much to the party. Always difficult to measure, but it is clear that the Italian Typhoons contributed more than their AV8s.

If you wanted to spend a fraction of what we paid by sending a carrier, the implication is that we would not have deployed out AAR, AWACS, Sentinel, Nimrod R1, comms fleet, ISTAR ground facilities etc etc. You are deluding yourself if you believe you can run an air campaign from a carrier - even the US wouldn't do that. Focussing on what fast jets provide is the mark of a rank amateur in air power terms.